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| [00:00.00] | It's the world's first historical thesaurus, |
| [00:02.91] | grouping words by meaning and by date. |
| [00:05.15] | And it survived fire, |
| [00:06.73] | lack of funds and the death of some of its founders. |
| [00:09.38] | Tomorrow the work will finally be unveiled to academics |
| [00:12.63] | prior to its publication in October. |
| [00:14.77] | Professor Christian Kay of the University of Glasgow |
| [00:18.24] | began work on the project as a 28-year-old research assistant. |
| [00:21.90] | She's now 69 |
| [00:23.58] | and thinks it will be invaluable to scholars |
| [00:26.28] | not just of linguistics |
| [00:27.35] | but of cultural and social history. |
| [00:29.43] | "You know, |
| [00:30.45] | if you're interested in something like clothes, |
| [00:32.28] | it's very interesting to |
| [00:34.16] | see what people have been wearing for the last 1,300 years. |
| [00:38.08] | So I was looking at a whole list of words |
| [00:40.52] | to do with trousers and there were words |
| [00:43.68] | that would never have occurred to you probably |
| [00:45.97] | that these words meant trousers." |
| [00:47.59] | That's where a thesaurus beats a dictionary, |
| [00:49.73] | she says. |
| [00:50.65] | But it's much harder work to compile. |
| [00:52.48] | In the early days they simply wrote the words |
| [00:55.13] | on slips of paper and grouped them in different ways. |
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